To Come and Go Like Magic Read Free Page A

alive.
    I look up now and see Willie grinning at me as if I’ve made a joke about Pop driving me to school.
    “If my momma ever got behind the wheel of a car, she’d probably kill herself or somebody else,” he says. “Tell
that
to your Santy.” His face is pinched up and his nose is red and when he laughs, he shakes all over. Mostly it’s because he’s cold.

B ad Habits …
    “Don’t hang around with welfares,” Pop says. “You’ll learn bad habits.”
    “What habits?”
    “Habits,” he says. “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    Pop takes a deep breath and lets it out in a puff. “You’ll learn to expect something for nothing,” he says. “You’ll want to depend on other people in order to eat.”
    “Like Uncle Lucius and Myra?”
    “No, no, no!” he shouts. “Not like Lucius and your sister. They’re different.”
    “How?”
    “Go get ready for school,” he says. “I’m trying to read my paper.”
    Pop’s at the table with the
Courier-Journal
opened on his left and the
Knoxville News Sentinel
on the right. He likes to see who’s saying what about important people.When it’s time to vote, Pop knows both sides and he always votes the man, not the party, he says. But no Democrats. No women. Pop has limits.
    I’m at the doorway when I decide to turn around and ask him a difficult question.
    “What if I was to run for president some day? Would you vote for me?”
    He looks up and laughs. “You?” he says. “You got a C in math the last six weeks.”
    “So?”
    “So … you couldn’t be president of anything. Not in a hundred years.”
    I don’t like math. I hate numbers. Numbers are not like words. Words have something to say; they go places, do things. Miss Matlock says words can change the world. You won’t see any numbers do that.

C ollections …
    We’ve been best friends since kindergarten. Ginny Murphy, Priscilla Martin, and me. We ride bikes,babysit, and do jump-rope team together. The “three Ms” is what our teachers call us. Pop says “three peas in a pod.”
    Ginny collects teen magazines and Priscilla collects ribbons for her hair.
    “What do you collect, Chili?” Priscilla looks at me with her pale gray eyes.
    It’s stone quiet. Just the bells in the church tower ringing noon. Ding. Ding. Ding. Twelve times. I wait.
    “Words,” I say.
    “Words?” Ginny looks at me like I’m joking.
    I collect words. They don’t have to be long or hard to spell, but they do have to be words we don’t use around here.
Concoction
. That’s the latest word in my red notebook. I think about mixing stuff in a big tub—herbs and spices and oils and colored water. A concoction. When I use a word that we don’t say around here, Ginny gives me
that
look. I make her tired, she says. I make her want to … she can’t think of a word. Sigh, I say. I make you want to sigh. Ginny rolls her eyes, looks at the clouds.
    I collect words, but they don’t do anything … yet. It’s like if Momma put up tomatoes and stuck the jars in the cellar and we never got around to eating them for a long, long time.

T he Corner Store …
    Brock’s store is on the corner where Persimmon Tree Road ends and Main Street begins, and they sell anything you want. Bread and milk and candy and meat. Mrs. Brock makes baloney sandwiches at lunchtime for the state highway men who pave the road in the summer and scrape snow in the winter. Even when they’re working somewhere else, the men come to Brock’s to get lunch because it’s cheap. Not like a restaurant. They pay for the baloney and bread and Mrs. Brock makes the sandwiches for free. “No tips,” she says. “We don’t take tips.” She says this in a half whisper when Mr. Brock is standing nearby.
    One day a city man traveling to Louisville stopped and bought a sandwich and left a dollar tip and Mr. Brock followed him all the way out to his car and propped the door open till the man took his money back. “No tips,” Mr. Brock said.
    In